Joanna’s Comments (group member since Nov 17, 2010)

Joanna’s comments from the Reading with Style group.

Post 573 Joanna wrote: "20.6 The Color Purple

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
(a Discworld book)
Low lexile - no styles

+20 Task

Task total: 20
Grand total: 705"

We're carring this title without any lexile restrictions. It works for 10.4, let us know if there are others. (And feel free to add a review if you wish.)

Okay, here's my review:

Zany and humorous, like all discworld books. The reader captured the tone perfectly for the audiobook. I want more of these books to be readily available as audiobooks because I particularly like these kinds of funny novels for driving long boring highways. I listened to most of this one while driving and it kept me laughing along for most of the ride.

I've made no effort to read the discworld books in any sort of reading order -- I just pick up any one that I can find as an audiobook when I want a light and funny read. This fit the bill perfectly and is available on scribd.

Combos - 10.4, 20.3, 20.4

+20 Task (20.6)
+15 Combo (10.4, 20.3, 20.4)
+10 Review

Task total: 45
Grand total: 730

20.6 The Color Purple

Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
(a Discworld book)
Low lexile - no styles

+20 Task

Task total: 20
Grand total: 705

10.8 Ukraine

The Invincible by Stanisław Lem

I really enjoyed this classic science fiction novel. The book felt very fresh even though it was written in 1964, except for the complete lack of female characters, which is pretty typical for science fiction of the time.

I enjoyed the way that the reader is taken along on scientific investigation. The ship Invincible has been sent to a far-away planet to figure out what happened to the previous ship (and crew) that landed on the planet. They slowly uncover details of what happened and figure out the details, all in a fairly convincing way. Lem manages to write an alien life that feels truly alien both to the reader and the characters in the book.

Very entertaining.

Note: the narrator for the audiobook is only okay. He tried to do more voices for the characters than was helpful or convincing. A more straightforward reader might have better matched the style of the book.

+10 Task
+15 Combo (10.5, 10.6, 20.7)
+10 Non-western
+10 Review
+5 Oldies (1964)

Task total: 50
Grand total: 685

Elizabeth (Alaska) wrote: "And a note to everyone: I just got a notice from Amazon that today is World Book Day. They have this every year, where you can get 10 Kindle books by authors around the world.

https://smile.amazo..."

I read The Ardent Swarm (available from Elizabeth's link) this season. It was an interesting book and (I think) my first book by a Tunisian author.

I think I'm on track to finish all 30 tasks. I'm so excited to be reading some real books again. I've had a long period of reading nothing but fluff. The 15-point tasks have led me to some interesting books that I likely wouldn't have picked otherwise. Just one more to go to finish that section.

I'm currently reading The Invincible by Stanisław Lem for Ukraine. It's surprisingly wonderful and hard to believe it was published in the 1960s. Way ahead of its time in the science fiction world.

20.10 Between the Wars

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

This is an easy read that made me long for vacation. The book brings together four near-strangers who club together to rent a castle in Italy for the month of April. All of the parts of the book that took place in Italy were lovely and I enjoyed the slow introduction of additional guests to the villa.

The parts of the book that took place in England as they dithered about whether they could really go, whether they could really afford it, and whether their husbands would mind took far too long and were rather tedious.

The narrator for the audiobook did a lovely job with the text and the accents. It made the book feel almost restful.

I see that the movie is available on Amazon Prime, so I think I'll watch that soon.

+20 Task
+10 Review
+10 Combo (10.2, 20.7)
+10 Oldies (pub. 1922)

Task total: 50
Grand total: 635

20.7 Oscar Wao

Framed! by James Ponti

low lexile - no style points

+20 Task (born in Italy; moved to FL around age 3)

Task total: 20
Grand total: 585

10.10 Group Reads

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

I've never been able to really get into reading cozy mysteries, but I'm all in for Chambers' variety of cozy sci-fi. At this point, I'd read just about anything that this author writes. I loved the first three Wayfarers books (and am looking forward to reading the fourth soon). I'm excited about this new series. Chambers has a way of writing inclusive characters and thoughtful interactions that demonstrate ways of interacting that feel authentic and also nice.

This book is about friendship and the meaning of life. But it's not moralizing nor does it purport to have complete answers. Just characters stumbling about trying to figure things out for themselves.

A lovely book. I'll definitely read the next in this series when it comes out.

+10 Task
+10 Review
+10 Combo (10.4, 10.5)

Task total: 30
Grand total: 565

20.4 Reivers

Beyond Shame by Kit Rocha

For a book that bills itself as dystopian romance or something like that, this book was surprisingly boring. The main characters in this book are essentially the mafia of a sector of town that has been banished from "Eden," the main town, after some unexplained dystopian event. The characters bootleg, steal, and generally use violence to control a semi-lawless area. The details turned out to be a bit ill-defined (e.g., I can't really tell you what happened to create this universe).

The author makes a concerted effort to make sure that the reader knows that all the sex in the book is consensual. But overall, the sex scenes were boring.

I'll pass on continuing this series.

+20 Task
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.4)

Task total: 35
Grand total: 535

20.1 Pulitzer

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

My friend Alex wrote the best review of this and you should really just go read his review instead of mine.

I adored this pre-Dracula lesbian vampire story. The book is (intentionally?) over the top, but also gothic and enigmatic and wonderful. (Also, I want to use the spelling vampyre from now on. Is that too pretentious?) Not only is this one of the earliest (the earliest?) vampyre stories, it's also one of the first stories of detective/researcher of magic. The book is framed as part of the case files of a doctor.

The book tells the story of a secluded young woman who lives with her father in an old castle. Then, a visitor implores them to take in her young daughter for a few months. Just go with it because the plot isn't the important part here. Don't get caught up in wondering why anyone would agree to this ridiculous request. Then weird things start happening--townspeople are mysteriously sickening and dying; the visitor seems strange; the secluded young daughter starts having crazy (and erotic) dreams and begins to seem sick.

Reading this sent me down a rabbit hole of reading about early vampyre tales. My favorite from that excursion is this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31713... --a scholarly article about what disease forms the basis of vampyre stories.

Highly recommend reading this book. It's very short, so if you don't like it, you won't have spent too much time on it.

+20 Task (pub. 1896)
+10 Oldies
+10 Review
+5 Combo (20.3)

Task total: 45
Grand total: 500

15.10 W. Asia

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

So, first a few complaints. One, the four narrators were barely distinct even though their stories were quite different and should have resulted in quite individualized narrative voices. The audio production didn't help by using a single narrator for the whole book, but I think this is a fault with the author's text more than with the audio narrator. Two, the historical context that makes this setting interesting is almost completely undeveloped. We are told that they are living in this awesome palace built by King Herrod and that that the relevant time period is the first century C.E. But for the way the women talk and most of their interactions, you wouldn't really know that it was all that long ago. Third, the magic that's woven into the story is sort of random and generally just explained as, "then the water ran black which I knew to be an omen of _____." Fourth, the religious beliefs/practices were frequently described in an almost academic way--something like, "our people believe that women should not touch a weapon and to do so makes one unclean. It is forbidden."

But, complaints aside, I was taken in by this book and these women. The story of this community crossing the desert to end up in this stronghold in the mountains was compelling and I enjoyed the building tension as the Romans are closing in. Though I knew the story would have and ending like it did, I thoroughly enjoyed the ending and thought the author handled it quite deftly.

With a heavier editorial hand, this book could have been great.

+15 Task (Israel)
+10 Review
+5 Jumbo (504pp)

Task total: 30
Grand total: 455

15.5 South Africa

When the Ground Is Hard by Malla Nunn
Lexile: 830

While reading this book telling the story of 1965 boarding school in Swaziland, I couldn't help but compare it to Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School, which I read earlier this year. Of course, the surroundings are quite different between a boarding school for mixed race students and preppy East Coast fanciness, but so much of the experience felt shared. The question of what role class plays, how to fit into a racially divided world, and where friendships are found and tested.

The book is marketed as young adult, and it reads that way to some extent. The relationship between the students is more cute than deeply described. Some of the more difficult moments of the book are told with distance, making them less gut-wrenching and graphic than they might otherwise be. But the issues grappled with are major and the author doesn't shy from wondering about the way the world could/should be different. The main character develops over the course of the book and is introspective about her relationship to her (mostly absent) white father, about her interactions with racist whites, and her feelings about the social structure of the school (where kids sort based on wealth, skin color, and family status).

I really enjoyed this book and would definitely recommend it for middle school and younger high school readers.

+15 Task (Swaziland)
+20 Project bonus (Swaziland)
+10 Review

Task total: 45
Grand total: 425

20.2 Prize

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Díaz

I wish I knew more about poetry. I'm positive that I missed a great deal of the nuance here just reading these poems at the surface level -- wow that's a cool turn of phrase, a beautiful image, a gut-punch. Reading through the author's notes at the back, I glimpsed the conversations that I'm missing. The way that these poems are referencing other poems and other literature, the way that these come together with concrete reference points. I would have appreciated even more endnotes to help guide me.

Still, even for the poetry uneducated, there was a lot to like about this collection. The range of topics and feelings, the contours of her difficult relationship with her brother, the odes to her partner.

+20 Task
+10 Review

Task total: 30
Grand total: 380

20.3 Our Town

Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

It took me over 20 years to get through this trilogy, so obviously I'm not the target audience. I loved the first book (All the Pretty Horses), but felt no immediate need to read the next one. I'm pretty sure I read that soon after it came out -- maybe around summer 1998. At that time, I lived for the first time in New York City and the book satisfied my inner longing for the open spaces of Texas I'd grown up surrounded by.

Then, I read the second book around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that point, the book was too bleak for my sinking depression and I gave it only three stars. I know the writing is pretty, but I didn't like the book. Also, the narrator for The Crossing was lousy.

Finally, I read this third installment. For the first half, I barely cared about these characters. Maybe I didn't remember them well enough. Or maybe the book was just moving too slowly. Around halfway through, things started to pick up and I was deeply invested in the book and the characters. But then the book ended with an overly long and slightly mystical epilogue that took me back to not really liking the book after all.

There's no doubt that McCarthy writes gorgeous sentences. And captures the sense of place of these fading times of open spaces and manly-men out cowboying. But a lot of the time I neither understood them nor cared about them enough to be drawn in.

+20 Task
+10 Review

Task total: 30
Grand total: 350

Cast Away: Poems for Our Time by Naomi Shihab Nye

Do the Lexile rules apply to poetry? It appears that Lexile doesn't assign scores to poetry and instead marks it "NP" for "non-prose".

10.1 GR Popularity

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

A quick, light, and entertaining read that was only slightly too long. The book traces a long friendship between the two main characters. They met in college and started a tradition of taking vacations together every summer. Over time, of course, they come to realize that they want to be more than friends but aren't sure how to make that happen and/or are afraid they'll lose their friendship by exploring romance.

The book flips between flashbacks to previous vacations and the present day. By the 75% mark, I was about ready for the book to finish up. The long reveal of their budding romance was starting to get on my nerves and the intentional quirkiness of the female lead was about enough already.

Still, the characters are well drawn, the descriptions of different vacation locations is entertaining, and overall the book works at what it sets out to be--a light beach read.

+10 Task (found on my 2021 list)
+10 Review
+5 Combo (10.4)

Task total: 25
Grand total: 320

10.4 Name

Lu by Jason Reynolds
low lexile

Highly recommend this series--have read it with a 10- and 12-year-old and everyone enjoyed all four of these books. Start with Ghost.

+10 Task

Task total: 10
Grand total: 295

15.1 North Africa

The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai

A slightly heavy-handed allegory that's so compulsively readable that all is forgiven, plus a very satisfying ending. The story dovetails that story of a beekeeper who discovers a new type of hornet decimating his bees with the story of Tunisia soon after the Arab Spring with budding democracy threatened by other interests (fundamentalists, moneyed royalty from nearby countries, general corruption, etc.). The writing, translated from French, flows nicely and kept me engaged.

I didn't know that not all bees knew the "ardent swarm" technique for killing invaders to the hive. The ardent swarm is where all the bees gather around an invading wasp or hornet and vibrate their bodies fast enough to generate enough heat to literally cook the invader (bees, apparently, can tolerate slightly hotter temperatures than some of these other insects). I'd read about this technique before and think it's one of the more fascinating defensive mechanisms.

The bees as allegory for the country felt a little forced at times, but overall was effective. I think this may be the first book I've read by a Tunisian author.

+15 Task (Tunisia)
+10 Review
+10 Non-western

Task total: 35
Grand total: 285

15.7 East Asia

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Very well-written book that sits somewhere at the border between quirky fun and existential depression. On the one hand, this is a big screw you to societal norms and expectations--why shouldn't someone live the life she wants even if it doesn't meet the goals traditionally set for women in modern society. In that light, this is a quirky character finding and enjoying her place in the world and all those nay-sayers who want her to marry, advance her career, and be "normal" are the villains.

On the other hand, this is a book where the only way that a neuro-atypical person finds a place in the world is working at a convenience store and thinking of herself as a Convenience Store Woman; she enjoys being a cog in the machine. But at heart, it feels like an admission that our society has no real way to meet the mantra of thinking of people with different brains/processing as different not less. Sure, the character finds a place--but it's in many ways a depressing place.

The audio version was excellent. I highly recommend this book in that format.

+15 Task (Japan)
+10 Review
+10 Non-Western

Task total: 35
Grand total: 250